


Flesh and Bone

by We_Band_of_Buggered



Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Angst, Motherly Mia, Teenage Leo, Vivid recollections of drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 19:54:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4492569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/We_Band_of_Buggered/pseuds/We_Band_of_Buggered
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A train journey leads to unexpected, vivid memories of the most traumatic day of Leo Elster's life. He is fourteen years old, and nothing in his life makes sense to him anymore. Notes contain spoilers, don't read if you haven't seen the entirety of season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flesh and Bone

**Author's Note:**

> This is set between Leo's death and David's unveiling of his Beatrice synth. I have taken liberties with setting and whatnot. Any and all feedback is welcome.

He wants to shout at them. He feels the urge building, swelling with a white hot anger somewhere deep inside him, and the words push at his lips but better judgement holds them back. He lets this internal struggle continue, feeling almost detached from it, as though each side of it is happening separately from him. All he knows is that his fingers are trembling on the table before him and he’s late. Not that there’s anyone keeping track of the time—no one other than himself that is. The train hasn’t moved in minutes, minutes that defy the laws of physics and stretch themselves thin over what Leo could swear is actually hours. The conversation behind him goes on, and Leo bites his tongue until the seconds feel so thin that they could snap with his patience.

“They say it’s like falling asleep,” one voice—male—comes, “Everyone always says they want to die in their sleep. Doesn’t everyone always say that?”  
“So you’re saying these people are lucky?” the female voice asks, curious rather than incredulous. There’s a newspaper spread across their laps. Leo can hear the rustling of the paper, sharp and pointed when she jabs her finger at one article in particular. He has seen it already, black letters stark against almost-white paper in the windows of every corner shop he passed on his way to the station. Missing Family Found Drowned. The second family in a mere matter of weeks actually. Six, to be exact. Six weeks ago to the day a mother drowned with her son in the same body of water that swallowed the lives of a family of sailors on an unexpectedly stormy day last week. There’s a crucial difference between the cases, however. 

The water didn’t spit any of those people back out. 

Drowning is nothing like falling asleep, despite the conviction in the voice of the man who insists, “Not lucky, but it could be worse! There are way more painful ways to go.” Leo knows that’s probably true for some people, but pain is so…subjective. He barely even realises that the breaths he’s taking are more uneven now, desperate, ragged, distorted by the images branded onto the backs of his eyelids. Every time he blinks his lungs are burning, his eyes stinging, his heart hammering in his chest and his body struggling with every last ounce of energy it could gather, until it exhausted itself. Every blink is a Polaroid of death. Water that had no surface, that stretched around and above him infinitely, no matter how desperately he shouted into it, thrashed in terror, the final twinges of hope his only remaining motivation. And in the end the water took him, consumed him, claimed him for itself and then decided not to keep him after all. Not his body, recovered that very day, not his soul, forced back into a cold body with a mind that barely knew itself anymore. 

“That’s true,” the woman agrees with her companion, though her tone is coloured with the uncertainty of someone who could never really know if she’s right, unless she experienced it, “Like…uh…”

“Diseases,” the man interjects, “Cancer, whatever. Knowing for months that you’re gonna die must be so much worse than—what?—a second or two of panic before you just…slip away? Everyone says that.”

“Who’s everyone?” Leo can’t help himself, twists himself around in his seat and glares sharply. He can feel the danger in his own eyes. The woman sees it too, taken slightly aback by it. The man falters too, but recovers quickly with a scoff. 

“Every time it happens,” he looks Leo in the eye, “That’s what they say on the news, in the papers, you hear so many people saying it.”  
“It’s like suffocating,” Leo tells him, voice low and full of irritation, “Have you seen movies where they suffocate someone? They’re always thrashing and fighting, clawing at the person doing it. Does that look peaceful to you?”

“I—“

“Because that’s exactly how it feels.” He looks the man straight in the eye. The man is older than Leo, somewhere in his twenties, and before he says another word to the teenager staring at him he looks at his companion. They share a look and it means something to them, as though they can communicate without words. Leo knows that feeling, knows two kinds of it actually. It happens to most people. All it takes is a strong enough bond, a comprehensive enough understanding of another human being, and if they understand you in the same way you don’t need words to communicate. Leo can look at the others—his brothers, his sisters—and know more than just the thought they’re having in that very specific moment. And with very little effort they can look into each other’s minds if they need to, memories unfolding effortlessly on computer screens, each and every fact securely retained no matter how insignificant it seemed at the time. Leo grits his teeth. These people think they know each other. They have no idea what it’s like to truly know someone.

“What’s your problem, kid?” the guy asks. There’s a softness to his voice that Leo thinks is involuntary. He’s not demanding, but nor is he politely inquiring. It’s somewhere in between but that does nothing to soothe his anger, and just as Leo opens his mouth a voice sounds from the side of the table.

“Leo.”

He turns quickly back in his seat. There’s something calming about her voice, something that makes it easy to pull his eyes from the couple behind him, from their ignorance, their armchair speculation about things they couldn’t possibly understand. He feels the tension, the anger pulsing through him still, but it lessens at the sight of her. Mia looks him carefully up and down, lets her eyes glide briefly to the couple before they move back to Leo.

“Is everything okay?” she asks him, genuine concern on her face, “Are you okay?” 

“Fine,” Leo nods, but his voice is low and he slides down in his chair. Mia lowers herself easily into the seat opposite him, and on the table she places the bottled water he requested and she reaches for his hand. She gives it a warm squeeze. Her hand feels no different than any woman’s would, the same soft skin as anyone conceived rather than created, birthed rather than powered up. The contact lenses hide the only giveaway that there’s anything different about her than people like that—than people. He manages a small smile at her, and she returns it but the worry brims in her eyes nonetheless. It sends a pang of guilt through him, something so human in someone who isn’t.  
The train stutters to a start and the rest of the journey passes in silence. The couple speak in whispers and Leo ignores them, shuts them out as best he can, focuses on the fact that Mia keeps his hand in hers and he feels loved for it, so impossibly loved. He steals glances at her occasionally, still learning about her. Of all of his siblings, Mia is the one he has bonded most strongly with since…since his father created the part of him that keeps him away from death. He was supposed to be finished, no longer someone who can take up space in train carriages and disturb other passengers with his icy eyes and the venom in his voice. Somewhere out there, between planes of reality, death probably feels cheated by the both of them.

Mia drops his hand when the train slows itself to a halt, and later, on the walk to the cemetery, she doesn’t try to take it again. She knows he doesn’t like that. He’s too old for it, for one thing. There’s a comfort in it that he doesn’t even need to admit to her. She can see it in him so easily that he may as well have exclaimed it, but that doesn’t change the facts. 

He knows his way to her grave by now. He knew it after the first visit, knew the whole town. It’s hidden at the far side of the cemetery, standing lonely behind rows upon rows of other people’s loved ones, of others who have died—at peace or in a chaos like hers—and he strides ahead of Mia to reach it. He can feel her eyes on him, worried and protective, looking after him from a distance. She follows him, and it’s only when they’re standing by the grave that she gives his hand another squeeze. It’s so motherly, so unconditionally adoring that he almost finds it surreal that another woman—who wasn’t even a woman to begin with, wasn’t even anything—is giving him that while his mother’s body lays rotting in a box six feet beneath his pristine, unnaturally clean shoes. 

“I don’t know what to say today,” he says, speaking to—who? Mia? Himself? Her? He honestly doesn’t know.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Mia tells him softly, “Or you can say anything you like. There’s never any pressure, Leo.”

Oh, but there is. A different kind of pressure, but it’s very much there. Electricity dancing inside him, channelling its way through a body that was grown inside the woman whose name he’s staring at in stone, a body with a heart, internal organs, blood as red as any human being’s and yet that’s not what he is anymore. He’s not like his parents, not like the family friends he knows he’ll never see again, the people his father insists he must stay hidden from. The truth of the matter is that his father pulled him back from death, forced him back into a body that expected a completely different life than it was allowed to have anymore. There’s no pressure to say anything, but there is pressure to live, to keep going, to figure out exactly why, and precisely what he’s supposed to do with this half-life of his. Half a person; half machine; half son; half creation. He doesn’t want to be only half alive. He doesn’t feel that way. He feels the tear rolling down his cheek and wonders how he can be. He’s like the rest of them and he’s not. He’s flesh and bone but he’s electricity too. Flesh and bone and electricity. What does that mean? Does that make him more than he was before, or less? Half or twice as much? His head spins with it all until his stomach follows suit and he feels nauseous. 

The machine in him works perfectly but, in this moment, the human part breaks down. On the afternoon of his fourteenth birthday, Leo Elster cries by his mother’s grave, held tight in the arms of a machine more compassionate than any human being he has ever known. And nothing makes sense.


End file.
